The Woman From Tantoura

by Radwa Ashour

  “She laughed, ‘I didn’t color it!’

  “‘Were you born like that?’

  “‘That’s a tattoo, and we inscribe it whenever we want. It beautifies the face. Do you want one like it?’

  “‘Yes, I do.’

  “‘What will you give me in exchange?’

  “I flew to the house and came back with a copper pot that I gave to her. She made the tattoo for me. I went home and when my mother saw the tattoo she stood screaming at me, threatening to beat me. When she found out about the copper pot she made good her threat and beat me with a stick until my brothers rescued me from her. For years I didn’t understand why my mother was so angry, and why she kept saying, ‘Now people will think you are one of the Nawar girls.’”

  What did Anis say? He was my grandson who lived in Canada, and he had been following what I told his cousin. He said what would never occur to me, nor cross my mind: “It’s clear that Great-grandma was racist. What she said about the Gypsies is racist talk, it’s not right, and beating children is also unacceptable.” He added, in English, “It’s politically incorrect!”

  I burst out laughing and laughed a long time, until the tears rolled down my cheeks. I said as I was wiping away the tears, “Your poor great-grandmother! God rest her soul and bless her and her time.”

  I wait for Maryam to return from the university. I wait for her to finish studying her lessons. I wait for the calls from the children. I wait for the six a.m. news broadcast, and for the news at eleven at night, and then for the news at six the next morning. The hours pass slowly, in loneliness, as if I were moving about in a cemetery. The summer comes, or more precisely a certain summer month comes, and the house comes to life. We have to organize comings and goings to avoid traffic congestion, and the conflict of temperaments and desires. “What will we cook tonight?” What the girl wants, the boy won’t like. One smokes ceaselessly and one can’t stand the smell of cigarettes, one wants to watch a soccer match and another wants the news, while the third group wants to watch movies. One calls from an inner room, “Lower your voices a little, I want to sleep,” and one asks for help from the kitchen because he has caused a minor disaster, with no great consequences. I say, “A madhouse!” and notice the confusion of Mira’s face, my granddaughter who wears glasses, who reads a lot, and who takes everything that’s said seriously. I explain, “I’m joking, your being here is as sweet as honey for me.”

  We laugh, we laugh between the jokes, the silly stories, and the recalled foolishness. We fill the gaps of months of absence with the stories of what happened to them, or to me, or to others of our family and friends who live in Ain al-Helwa or in Jenin or in Tunis or who stayed in the area of al-Furaydis, or who are scattered among the villages nearby, those we know and see from time to time and those we never meet, whose stories reach us and which we repeat, so they become part of the shared fabric of the family.

  My neighbor, a young woman, a doctor to whom Maryam introduced me, asked me, “Your oldest granddaughter is in college, when did you get married?”

  “Before I was fifteen.”

  “God forbid, you were a child!”

  I changed the subject as I didn’t think it was appropriate to present the story of my life, with a full accounting, to a neighbor who had met my daughter less than two weeks before, and then had surprised me with a visit, saying that she wanted to meet me. There was plenty of time for us to become closer, to become friends, and for her to know some of my story—or to be satisfied with polite neighborliness, “Good morning” and “How are you?” when we met by chance in the elevator or at the door of the building, each going her own way and knowing no more of her neighbor than her name and the broad outlines of her life.

  After the month of vacation, which might be a week more or less for one reason or another, I say goodbye to the children. The schedule of arriving flights is exchanged for another one, for departures to Abu Dhabi, to Toronto, to Paris, to Lid via Larnaca or Athens, to Nablus via Amman and the bridge. We go to the airport, then we go again, then we go a third time and a fourth and sometimes a fifth. Weeping has been worn out, maybe because the tears have become ashamed of themselves, there’s no place for them. The children kiss my hand and move away with unhurried steps, not turning around so I can see their faces one more time. The grandchildren, Noha and Huda and Amin Junior and Anis and Mira, follow their families with hurried steps, turning their necks again and again: “Goodbye, Teta.” I look at their smiling faces. I wave. They wave.

  I hold Maryam’s arm as we come home together. A space of calm to recover the usual rhythm, to contemplate, to bathe, to put the house in order, to repair my relationship with the plants which I’m convinced get angry, like children, if you neglect them.

  Usually it all takes two weeks, after which the house regains its cleanliness, the window glass and the wooden shutters and the doors, the carpet and the curtains and the furniture. And I spoil the plants, seeking to please them until they are satisfied.

  Afterward I return to my usual daily schedule: I listen to the news broadcast at six. I wake Maryam. We have breakfast together. She goes to her university and I go to the sea. I cross the Corniche and go down to the beach. I take off my shoes, I go across the sand until the end of the wave reaches me and wets the edge of my dress. When I go up to the paved road, I walk for an hour or more. Then I go home. I boil coffee, and I drink it in the company of the plants on the balcony.

  It’s strange; after the children have left, with the first sip of the first cup of coffee I make myself, my mother’s voice always comes to me, crying in disapproval, “You are sending your daughter all the way to Haifa, Abu Sadiq!” I smile and murmur the Fatiha for her spirit.

  3

  Fickle February

  In our town we call grass “spring,” because the spring is when the year turns and its season arrives, when it clothes the hills and the valleys. Classes and types and denominations of color, intense or coarse, deep or delicate, soft or light and vivid, all an unruly and unfettered green, and no one is sad. In its expanse grow the wildflowers, scattered wherever they please. But despite their red or yellow or gradations of purple, they can never be anything other than miniatures plunged in the sea of green.

  All alone the almond tree ruled over spring in the village, the undisputed queen. None of the surrounding trees dared to contest it. Even the sea was jealous of the almond tree in the spring, even the sea foam was jealous, for what was its poor white compared to a heart like a carnation, taking one stealthily to a frank crimson? The almonds flower and steal our hearts, and then they capture them entirely with their delicate, deceptive fruit, stinging and sweet. We don’t wait for it to harden, we stretch our hands to pick what’s close. We climb the branches and take what we want. We eat in the trees or carry it as provisions in our pockets, or lift the ends of our garments to hold them, and then fly home.

  My mother says, “February can’t be tied down.” She says, “February is fickle and stubborn, it huffs and puffs and has the smell of summer.” The winds are active and the waves high and the cold still lingers, cutting to the bone as if we were in the depths of winter, but we know that March is only two steps away. Then the almond flowers, as if opening the way and giving permission, followed by the apricot blossoms, and afterward the trees are covered as they rush to compete, first with their flowers and then with the early fruit. Then we know that April has planted its feet on the earth, and that May will follow it, to set the wheat on the threshing floors and the fruit on the trees.

  So why did they choose these four months for war, for strikes, and for killing people without number?

  I didn’t know all the details, what happened in Haifa on any given day, how many were killed by the powder barrel the settlers rolled down Mount Carmel on such-and-such a street, or in what village they invaded the houses by night, pouring kerosene on the stores of flour and lentils and oil and olives, firing on the inhabitants. But like the rest of the girls in town I knew that t
he situation was dangerous, not only because we heard some of what went from mouth to mouth, but also because there was something frightening in the air, something on the verge. On the verge of what? We didn’t know. The madafa that served as a town hall for the men was almost never without meetings, where they would stay until late at night. Sometimes my father would wake us, asking us to prepare something to eat and a bed for guests, saying, “It’s late, they will spend the night with us. Offer them whatever there was for supper, and get up early in the morning to prepare breakfast because they are traveling.” So we would make a quick supper and prepare a bed, and get up early in the morning to make breakfast for the men who were traveling.

  My father and the men of the village must have known about the partition resolution when it happened, and in those meetings of theirs they were making their arrangements to confront it. (The coastline from south of Acre to south of Jaffa, including our village, was included in the Jewish state after the partition.) But I don’t remember that I heard about it or that the topic was brought up among the women of the village, or among the girls like me. The first news that alerted me was what happened in Haifa at the end of the month of December, since one of the neighbors told my mother about fights in Haifa between the Jewish and Arab workers in the oil refinery. The neighbor said that the Jews threw a bomb from a fast-moving car and killed and wounded many of us. She said that on the very next day the Palestinian workers rose against the Jewish workers, armed with sticks and knives, taking vengeance and killing anyone they could. Before dawn the Jewish soldiers attacked Balad al-Sheikh and a neighborhood on its heights where the refinery workers from Ijzim and Ain Ghazal and other neighboring villages lived with their wives and children. They descended on the residents with axes and knives and bombs and rifles, and left behind them corpses everywhere. Some say they killed sixty residents and some say that hundreds were killed.

  My mother got up hurriedly and I followed her. She went to the house of the headman and asked me to go into the madafa and call my father. He came.

  “What is it, Umm Sadiq?”

  “Have you heard about what happened in Haifa?”

  “I heard.”

  “Aren’t you going to go to see your boys?”

  “God protect them, if one of them had been hit we would have heard the news from a hundred sources. Be calm. What happened, happened in the oil refinery, and it’s far from where they live and from the school and the bank. Go home, women don’t come to the madafa like this to talk to the men at the door!”

  “But the boys …”

  He cut her off. “The boys are fine, God willing, and they’ll come at the end of the week. And if they can’t come because of the situation, they’ll come at the end of the week after.”

  We went home. My mother was crying and saying over and over, “O Lord, O Lord, protect her and me and my boys and deliver them, O Almighty, O Munificent.” Her voice would choke in tears and then rise in lament: “Yaammaa, apples of my eye, they’re shooting at you so far away and nobody even knows, yaammaa, oh my beloveds!” I shouted at her, “Your weeping is a bad omen, Mama. It’s forbidden! Our Lord will be angry with you and afflict them tomorrow with what spared them today.” I said it in a decisive tone, as if I were scolding her. The words stuck in her mind and she calmed down, and then turned toward the sky and said, “Forgive me O Lord, I’m not opposing your decree. Protect Sadiq and Hasan, restore them and bring them home safe and sound from distant lands. Be kind to us, O Lord.” It was as if God had heard her and shut the door as she finished speaking, and she considered it an agreement. She looked at me suddenly, as if she had finally realized that I was walking beside her, and said, “By God, by God, I will not give you to the boy from Ain Ghazal if he doesn’t promise to live far away from Haifa. We’ll record the condition in the marriage contract!”

  While we waited for Thursday my mother hid her fears in her breast, afraid to break the implicit agreement between her and the Most High, as if what I had said about the omen was not from my own mind but rather an inspiration from Him, telling her His will and conditions. The poor thing kept the conditions and followed the path with determination, not crying or complaining or referring to the subject, just growing paler day by day. When Abu Isam’s bus returned from Haifa the tears began to flow silently from her eyes. Then a boy came from the direction of the highway, bringing her good news and saying that they had arrived in a car that left them at the entrance to the village, at the place we called “the Gate.” “I saw them with my own eyes.” My mother got up, washed her face and changed her dress and went out to the courtyard of the house. My father joined her. She saw them coming from afar but she stayed calm, as if she were waiting until she could be certain beyond any doubt. When they came within two steps of her, so that her hand could touch them, she let out a ringing trill of joy—at which my father slapped her face with his hand, a resounding slap followed by a shout of anger, “Have some shame, woman! A hundred men were martyred in one week and you are trilling!” Silence fell, all movement stopped. My brothers stopped walking, I was nailed to the ground. My mother seemed thrown into confusion, not knowing what to do about the first slap she had ever received from her cousin. Then the scene resumed: my brothers began walking toward the house. They kissed their father’s hand before moving to their mother’s arms, waiting to enfold them.

  My father said, “Come with me to the madafa, to give the men the news from Haifa.”

  My mother asked, whispering, “And supper?”

  My father asked, “Are you hungry?”

  “We’ll eat and then we’ll go to the madafa.”

  “You won’t die of hunger; follow me to the madafa. After that you can eat however you like.”

  The madafa in the headman’s house was where the men met to talk, to spend the evening in company, to discuss recent events and sometimes to solve disputes; and there the men sat in a circle around the radio to listen to the news. Women did not enter the madafa and the only news that reached them was what the men kindly told them, which they then exchanged among themselves. When it all happened the roof collapsed on everyone’s head, with no difference between the men and the women, the old and the young, or even the nursing infants dependent on their mother’s milk for their very life. I said there was no difference; I take that back, and I look at it again. There was a difference. Yes, there was a difference.

  A few weeks after my mother’s joyful trill and the slap that followed it, the refugees arrived in the village. Qisarya was located on the sea like us but it was south of town; it fell and the residents were forced to leave, and our village hosted some of the families. Our share of the guests was a widow with two children, a four-year-old boy and a girl a year younger than I. My new friend Wisal, the first of the refugees I met, told me about the scenario that all of the coastal towns, and others, would live through three months later. The scenario was not identical in every detail but it was the same in the general outlines. My friend told me that the Jewish troops laid siege to the town, attacked it, and drove the people out of their houses.

  “My mother said, ‘Where will we go? We have no one to support us, no one who can take us to another town or arrange a way for us to live.’ She insisted on staying in the house. We stayed, and we learned that others did as we did. A week after they entered the town, they took us out of the houses and destroyed them and forced us to leave. They did the same with the Muslims and the Christians.”

  I found that strange, and I asked, “Are there Christians in your town?”

  “Yes, Muslims and Christians and Jews.”

  “And Jews?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the ‘company,’ or in the town?”

  “In the town.”

  “Many?”

  “No, a few.”

  “Did they drive them out?”

  “They came to give them the village, so why would they drive them out? Are there Jews in your village?”

  “There was one man, t
hen he moved to Zummarin, their ‘company’ in Zummarin that’s called Zikhron Yaakov.”

  “Is it large?”

  “Oh yes, it’s large. East of the village. It’s about an hour’s walk away.”

  “They built a ‘company’ in our town too, they can get there in a ten-minute walk. They built it in the town territory, on farmland. They built it a few years ago; its name is Sdot Yam. I haven’t visited it.”

  “I haven’t visited Zummarin either, but my father visited it, because there was a problem, and the police station and the government are there. There are people in the village who sell fish there and sometimes eggs, and sometimes they buy clothes there because they’re cheap. But my father says that since the big strike in ’36 there has been a decision: we will not sell to them or buy from them. Sometimes they come to swim in the sea. Or there’s a problem, so the headman of the ‘company’ visits the headman of the village. When will you go back?”

  “My mother says we’ll go back soon. I don’t believe her.”

  I introduced my friend to the girls of the village. I took her to the Sugar Spring and the Newlyweds’ Beach and the islands and the castle built on one of them. She did not find it wonderful. She said, “Our village is bigger. The houses are bigger and there are more streets and we have more gardens. And we have ruins.”